Opera, Chrome, Firefox, OR?

[Josephine]

I used to be a big fan of firefox, but I really like chrome's interface. It's very minimal, and give you more space for actual web pages.

For what it's worth, here's Firefox, with toolbar layout matched to Chrome, alongside Chrome itself. The height of the interface is almost identical.

Spoiler:

Now run them maximized. Chrome's tabs get shoved to the very top of the screen, making 2 lines. firefox keeps the title bar.

[hotaru]

firefox 4.0 beta 1 is there. good stuff, runs nice, fast and will eventually support all the extensions i can’t browse without

firefox 4.0 beta 1 also completely ripped off opera's look... which was strongly influenced by chrome.

[cjmcjmcjmcjm]

firefox 4.0 beta 1 is there. good stuff, runs nice, fast and will eventually support all the extensions i can’t browse without

firefox 4.0 beta 1 also completely ripped off opera's look... which was strongly influenced by chrome.

I though I opened some strange Opera port for mac when I first ran it

[TheChewanater]

I'm really glad they haven't messed up the Linux version of Firefox 4b's interface yet. Hopefully they'll at least add an option to go back to the original interface when they do.

[Amnesiasoft]

firefox 4.0 beta 1 also completely ripped off opera's look

Yeah, except they did a really bad job of it.

[Kaelri]

Now run them maximized. Chrome's tabs get shoved to the very top of the screen, making 2 lines. firefox keeps the title bar.

Mm, fair enough. The difference is still pretty minimal (77px vs. 62px). But I concede the difference itself.

[TheChewanater]

Only about 32px of wasted space, not including the WM-controlled title bar. And I fit the main menu, all of my bookmarks, and the address bar.

[Amnesiasoft]

77px vs. 62px

Oh no! Opera loses by a single pixel!

[hotaru]

that looks like a lot more than a single pixel to me...

[Kaelri]

Only about 32px of wasted space, not including the WM-controlled title bar. And I fit the main menu, all of my bookmarks, and the address bar.

Well, the titlebar is pretty significant, I'd say, given that Chrome and Opera (and soon Firefox) are eschewing it altogether. So you've still got the full 58px in my book, and you haven't opened a second tab. ;)

(Nice infinite-screenshots though.)

[Amnesiasoft]

that looks like a lot more than a single pixel to me...

We're talking maximized windows here. Because Chrome and Opera move the tabs into the title bar. At least, my Opera does.

[TheChewanater]

Only about 32px of wasted space, not including the WM-controlled title bar. And I fit the main menu, all of my bookmarks, and the address bar.

Well, the titlebar is pretty significant, I'd say, given that Chrome and Opera (and soon Firefox) are eschewing it altogether. So you've still got the full 58px in my book, and you haven't opened a second tab.

(Nice infinite-screenshots though.)

Oh dear! This page has 20px of content below-the-fold!

Code: Select all

killall compiz

[hotaru]

that looks like a lot more than a single pixel to me...

We're talking maximized windows here. Because Chrome and Opera move the tabs into the title bar. At least, my Opera does.

oh... maximized, opera wins by a single pixel:


... but maximizing a browser window on my laptop's 1920x1200 screen doesn't really make sense.

oh, and apparently removing the home button from firefox 4b1's toolbar doesn't stick. it comes back every time i restart firefox...
days using it: 2
bugs found: 3 (including 1 minor security issue)
bugs reported: 0
... if they want people to report bugs, they should make it as convenient as possible. if it's easier for me to post a security vulnerability on 4chan than it is to report it on your bug tracker, guess where it's going...

[TheChewanater]

I dare anyone to beat 30px and include tabs, an address bar, and bookmarks, all with a reasonable horizontally expandable amount of space.

[Berengal]

I dare anyone to beat 30px and include tabs, an address bar, and bookmarks, all with a reasonable horizontally expandable amount of space.

I seem to remember... Yes, here it is, on page 7:

Spoiler:

Yes, Uzbl doesn't show the address bar, bookmarks or tabs. In fact, it doesn't even have those; it's user interface consists entirely of whatever webkit has built in and some pipes and sockets to connect external programs to. I used a combination of hacked-in WM commands and tiling algorithms, dmenu scripts and some of the bundled programs. Normally (as in the image) they didn't show, but you only need those when you're addressing/bookmarking/tabbing anyway. Also, they were only a few pixels (10-ish) in height when they were showing anyway.

[Amnesiasoft]

I dare anyone to beat 30px and include tabs, an address bar, and bookmarks, all with a reasonable horizontally expandable amount of space.

screenshot2.png

Sure, there's a reasonable amount of space for the address bar now, but what about when you open 6 more tabs?

[Josephine]

Or, like some people can get to, 60?

[TheChewanater]

I dare anyone to beat 30px and include tabs, an address bar, and bookmarks, all with a reasonable horizontally expandable amount of space.

screenshot2.png

Sure, there's a reasonable amount of space for the address bar now, but what about when you open 6 more tabs?

I can open 10 tabs before a typical Phpbb viewtopic page with a 13 character domain name and an RSS feed icon gets partially covered up.

EDIT: I just remember I removed the bookmarks button earlier today in favor of shortcuts, so these results are for a slightly different configuration.

[Josephine]

Actually, if I was going to design a browser interface with one line, I would have back, forward, reload, etc. along with tabs on one line, in the title bar. Hitting a key combination would switch the tabs to an address bar.

[hotaru]

i used to hate clicking on links to pdf files and then having to wait while that stupid adobe plugin froze my whole browser for several minutes and consumed hundreds of megabytes of RAM... i'm glad chrome has eliminated that.

[TheChewanater]

Firefox opens PDFs in Evince for me, which usually starts up near-instantly.

[Emu*]

Removing some of Acrobat's plugins will speed it up. You'll be safer too!

[tuseroni]

firefox...even though i am posting from chrome right now >.>....
its mostly because of firebug (plus chrome bitches at me when i try to full screen a video embeded in an iframe...it just goes black in the frame...cant watch videos on people youtube channels...) chromes debugger is nice....but its no firebug. for instance:
in both i can add a watch to a variable, but in chrome i have to copy the name of the variable, click add watch then paste it into the watch area...firebug i right click and go to "add watch"
in firebug i can mouse over a variable to get information about it, in chrome i have to add it to the watch.
the dom tab is better than that thing chrome has on the side.

there are a few other small things.

but i love the html5 feature chrome has that ff doesnt(web sockets, notifications api)...but even more i like the html5 features firefox has that chrome doesnt (like the files API) and i love chromes css3 features (like transitions...3d effects...)
they both need to hurry the hell up with their date tag (i hate making calendars and i hate using other peoples bloated js calendars)

chrome takes a dive when i have a lot of tabs up (which at present i have 12...on firefox i regularly have twice that) but by and large its much faster (havent really given firefox 4 a test drive) so for just day to day surfing i use chrome, when i need to debug something, develop something, or watch certain pornos....firefox...

[SiimN]

Opera - I think its best for laptop (I don´t have much experience with Chrome). I takes minimal screen space which is important with my laptop, Opera turbo is good when you are in slow networks, like some random wifi-s, it has many simple shortcuts that are useful with a basic mouse and keyboard (no shortkeys)

[Josephine]

It's not as full of hotkeys, but look into Chrome if you like a minimal footprint.

[Stacy S.]

I use firefox at home, almost exclusively.

I use chrome at work most of the time, even though FF is available. It just happened that way.

I don't really have a preference of one over the other. Chrome doesn't have a native 'send to' function and I haven't bothered to create one for it. That's an irritant.

I have to use IE at work sometimes. Our intranet only works on IE, as well as some of our in-house apps (f-ing stovepipes!). I hate IE both in practice and principle.

[webgiant]

I chose "Firefox", because that is technically my browser, though the actual truth is that I've been using Swiftfox on all of the Linux machines in place of Firefox, and I do all my web browsing in Linux. Swiftfox is an optimized build of Firefox for modern Intel and AMD (separate versions for each) CPUs.

[mikecoulter]

For a very long time, I touted Firefox as the best option for people wanting less hassle whilst browsing the internet. For sometime that then changed to Safari, then Opera. But now, I am the proud user of Google Chrome. It feels so clean, fast and efficient.

I also like it for it's bookmarks system, very simple and quick.

I'd recommend that everyone should at least check it out to see if its for them.

[Noblesaur]

From my experience Google Chrome is by far the fastest and most appeasing to the eye. It makes surfing the web extremely simple, and that's its entire purpose. Obviously it has drawbacks when it comes to certain websites and compatibility and such, but I always have my good old Internet Explorer on alert, for whenever I need him.

[flying sheep]

if it’s all about speed and cleanness, nothing can beat uzbl

[EFO]

Google chrome all the way. I like it's cleanness and simplicity, and the extensions. IE 9 looks a lot better, but I suppose it still doesn't have any adblock thing...

[zmatt]

Firefox, mainly because once I get used to an interface and a system that is good and works, to get me to change you can't just be as good, you have to be much better. It's the reason I started using Firefox in the first place, IE 6 was just so bad in comparison, once I used firefox there was no comparison. Opera and chrome may be good, and I have used them at different points, but they aren't THAT good if you get my drift. I have been noticing firefox start to slow down with newer releases and it's feeling more bloated. I may have to go to chrome due to it's stripped down nature. How are they are addons now btw?

[Dason]

How are they are addons now btw?

When chrome first came out I tried it but I couldn't stick with it because there weren't the addons that I liked from firefox. Now all the addons that I care about have chrome versions as well. Firefox takes a lot longer to load so I've slowly been switching over to chrome. Of course some of the computers I use I'm not given that option so I stick with firefox on those...

[cjmcjmcjmcjm]

Google chrome all the way. I like it's cleanness and simplicity, and the extensions. IE 9 looks a lot better, but I suppose it still doesn't have any adblock thing...

Nor does it have spell-ckecking or user scripting support

[broken_escalator]

If chrome had spellcheck, greasemonkey, and a stumbleupon toolbar I would switch. At the time of writing this, I don't think they do but feel free to correct me!

[Dason]

I couldn't find greasemonkey but it definitely has spell checking and stumbleupon...

[broken_escalator]

Bleh I wrote chrome but I mean IE9 >.<

Case of writing what you're looking at instead of what you meant.

[squareroot]

I use Google Chrome... I used to use and like Firefox, but I'm generally a bit of a Google fan, so I tried it... I really enjoy the UI. It's clean, but still also efficiently usable (directed at the Uzbl) people. And I prefer their debugging interface over Firefox's (even though it's really just the same as Safari). Would be nice if Chrome had a more integrated Java console.

I'll have to take a better look at Uzbl, though, after seeing this thread..

[drkslvr]

Firefox, mainly because once I get used to an interface and a system that is good and works, to get me to change you can't just be as good, you have to be much better. It's the reason I started using Firefox in the first place, IE 6 was just so bad in comparison, once I used firefox there was no comparison. Opera and chrome may be good, and I have used them at different points, but they aren't THAT good if you get my drift. I have been noticing firefox start to slow down with newer releases and it's feeling more bloated. I may have to go to chrome due to it's stripped down nature. How are they are addons now btw?

I made the switch to FF for the same reason as zmatt. But for me, the switch to Chrome was just as intuitive. FF had been getting slower and slower. Chrome was simply fast. As an added bonus, it has a cleaner interface and saves more screen space for the page being displayed, rather than wasting it on menus. The developer tools are also pretty nifty. I missed a couple of my extensions when I first switched, but Chrome now has plenty of extensions to keep most everyone happy.

When the newest Opera came out, I had several friends encourage me to switch. I gave it a whirl, but in the end, Opera is to Chrome is like the cabin of a stealth bomber is to the Staples easy button. If you want a million options laid out constantly before you, go with Opera. If you want easy, go with Chrome. I picked easy.

[flying sheep]

…but still also efficiently usable (directed at the Uzbl people).

i’m no uzbl guy (just looked at it once because it is a new approach), but you know what “uzbl” stands for?

[hr]

and you all know that the “chrome being faster” thing was true because of the first javascript jit compiler? now every browser has these, and chrome isn’t noticable (if at all) faster anymore.